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this?”
    “Well—I’m not making any promises,” Tryn said, pulling a face. “But I wouldn’t have left my students halfway through the semester if I didn’t think I could help.”
    “Of course you wouldn’t. I’m not suggesting—you’re brilliant, I didn’t mean to—” Tangled, Bail stopped talking and started pacing again. A tension headache was brewing behind his tired eyes. “Sorry. Like I said, it’s been a long day and it’s not over yet.”
    Tryn came around to the front of his bench and hitched himself onto it. His bright orange trousers rode up his skinny ankles, revealing mismatched socks of fluorescent green and pink. His lab clogs were crimson. So were his eyes. Well. Today they were crimson. Yesterday they’d been violet. Tomorrow, who knew? Tryn was a man of changeable disposition.
    “Bail?” he said, gentle now, his temper abandoned. “I’ve never heard you sound this scared. What aren’t you telling me? What’s happened now?”
    Nothing had happened, and that was the problem. There’d been no word from Obi-Wan or Anakin since they alerted Yoda that they were going back to Lok Durd’s compound. And in this situation no news was
not
good news. No news was very
bad
.
    “You don’t have to say,” Tryn added. “But as it stands, I’m the next best thing you’ve got to a captive audience.”
    Bail hesitated. Tryn Netzl had been Witness at his marriage. Had put him and Breha with the best fertility doctor in the Republic and matched him drink for drink after every one of Breha’s five miscarriages. Tryn had let him weep without saying a word when their last hope for a child was exhausted. There was nothing he could not entrust to this man.
    But I need him focused. So pull yourself together, Organa. If he’s worried about you, he can’t do his job. And if he can’t do his job…
    “You’re right, I am worried about something,” he said, because he would never lie to Tryn. “But it’ll keep. What can you tell me about this bioweapon?”
    Tryn frowned. “It makes me ashamed I was ever proud to call Bant’ena Fhernan a colleague.”
    There was a second bench in the lab, piled high with flimsies and hard-copy biochemistry texts and at least a score of datareaders. Bail leaned one hip against it and folded his arms.
    “She’s under duress, Tryn.”
    “I don’t care. What she’s created is a perversion of science. She’s betrayed herself and her calling.”
    “There are those who say every weapon created is a perversion of science,” he pointed out. “And that using those weapons is a betrayal of life. I seem to recall
you
making a few heated points in favor of that argument, once or twice.”
    Tryn scowled. “I don’t like war. I don’t like killing.”
    “I don’t either,” he said, after a moment. “But since we last sat down face-to-face, my friend, I’ve killed. It was in self-defense, and in defense of others, but even so…” Remembering the desperate battle on that secret space station, a confrontation he often relived in his dreams, Bail shook his head. “I can’t even tell you how many. There wasn’t time to stop and count. And while I’m coming clean, I suppose I should also confess that I voted for the creation of the Republic’s clone army—now, that’s science taken to extraordinary lengths—and two days ago I approved the diversion of funds from a refugee crisis program to the discretionary account used to make up the shortfall in payments for clone replacements.”
    “I don’t—I can’t see—” Tryn wrapped his long braid around his fingers and pulled hard, a familiar nervous habit. “
Stang
, Bail. Why would you tell me that?”
    “I guess because…” He sighed. “How do we know what we’d do if we were forced to watch someone we loved
die
because we didn’t do as we were told?”
    Tryn stared at the floor, uncomfortable. “I’d like to think I’d have the guts to stay strong, no matter the pressure—or the